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Anyone out there have ant problems, in the house or other places? I have concocted a recipe that I use in a sprayer and also use as drops for the ants to eat and take home to the queen. It is a slow poison but it will work.

Directions
Bring water to a slow boil and boric acid, mix till dissolve, next add sugar, honey. Keep stirring till all is dissolved on a low flame. Let cool. Place several drops in area where ants are using their trails. Keep feeding them (don't want them to get hungry). Results in 2 - 3 days. All will be dead in 5 days. Stragglers will just be wandering around aimlessly. This poison is made to kill the queen so it is a slow working one but very effective. It kills the whole colony.
As a spray I kick or dig open the colony and spray it with a pump sprayer soaking the whole batch of ants, eggs, etc with the stuff. I do that several times.
I hope this works for you as well as it does for me.
Dan

Everytime I check on my hives I have ants crawling all over them. The carpenter ants are giving me heck. I couple of times I have had little piles of sawdust at the edges of the bottom board. I've tried boric acid. Seems to work for while. Might try this solution next.

It is a three inch green plastic container with a stake on the bottom. There are holes that let only ants and small bugs inside. The ants must crawl up into the station to get the poisen. Once eaten, they carry it back to the colony to feed the queen ant.

I would try to construct a physical barrier to keep the ants out. One way would be to raise the hive on stilts set in a mote of oil with a rain shield to keep the oil from being washed out.

Another option is to build an electric fence around the hive made of strips of copper foil and charged with a 9-volt battery (except that this one is already patented (as seen on "Invent This") but maybe not the application for bee hives). If you keep it clean there is no current flowing (unless an ant tries to cross) so an alkaline battery should last 1 or more years.

In both these systems you need to keep grass and weeds below the level of the barrier or they will form a bridge that the ants will use.

I based my formula on Revenge, Agway and Walmart sell this stuff but its expencive compaired to what I have made. My carpenter ants ate it. The larva need some sweets just like the adults. True they like protine but they also need the sweets, just like the bees. Yes boric acid is bad for the bees but if you put it under a cover so ants can get to it and not the bees then you have no problems.
Dan